Valentine’s Day 2020 was rough for Gareth Whitton, marked by his final shift as head pastry chef at the ritzy Dinner by Heston restaurant. Just a week before, he and the rest of the staff had been unceremoniously let go, following a snap cancellation of the restaurant’s lease. Whitton had been with the team since 2015, working at the original Dinner in London.

This year, his February 14 was vastly different. Whitton’s business, Tarts Anon (which he runs with life partner Catherine Way), collaborated with fellow online bakery Miss Trixie Drinks Tea to create Tart Throb, a rich chocolate-hazelnut tart that sold out in seconds. This was to be expected – before there was a shopfront to visit, every Tarts Anon release sold out right away.

Whitton and Way have a knack for doing things by months. They did their first tart drop in September 2020, and last September took over defunct chocolate company Hey Tiger’s former premises in Cremorne.

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The bright, white, high-ceilinged space opened last month with a new fit-out inspired by the apartment where it all started. There are white subway tiles on the walls, draping pot plants and the timber along the front of the bar nods to the floorboards the couple has at home.

While Whitton works out the back in the kitchen, the new place has a front-of-house space serving Square One coffee and five flavours of tart by the slice. Take-home tarts by the quarter, half or whole still have to be pre-ordered online from 6pm on Mondays for weekend collection.

Look out for Whitton and Way’s favourite flavour, pear, alongside a classic lemon tart and a brown butter and banana number. Then there’s the crowd favourite: a gooey caramel and chocolate custard tart Whitton developed in 2015 while working at a gastropub in Sydney. The recipe for this show stopper appears in Broadsheet’s new cookbook, Home Made.

The new site is a big step for a business founded in the midst of lockdown. With no kitchen jobs on the horizon, Whitton was packing supermarket shelves but felt the pull to bake and be involved with food again.

“We started baking at home,” he says. “Bread, crumpets … we had sourdough coming out the wazoo. But then there were the tarts. I think every single restaurant I’ve worked at has had a tart in some capacity, from a staff food regular we did at Quay, to the little Shrewsbury custard tarts on the lunch menu at Dinner. I loved it and started playing around with them at home.”

Way is a full-time speech pathologist but saw the potential in what he was doing.

“Gareth was doing something different from what other people were putting on Instagram,” she says. “It wasn’t homemade – it was restaurant quality.”

It took her two or three months to convince Whitton to do something with it. She had the Tarts Anon name and an Instagram account ready to go before he agreed to the idea. They put flyers in letterboxes in their apartment building and posted on a local Facebook group.

“It just blew up,” she says.

The first week Whitton made two tarts (a choc-caramel and a cherry-almond) and sold a quarter of each. The following week, he made 10 tarts and sold them all. Soon after it was 20, then 70 once he moved into the kitchen at Collingwood co-working space Worksmith. Nowadays he’s banging out 200 a week in Cremorne.

In the early stages, Tarts Anon was just a side hustle – a weekend bake-off for first in, best dressed orders. And Whitton had left the supermarket for a full-time job as a sous chef at Lune.

“I was burning the candle at both ends, running the Lune kitchen five days a week and trying to squeeze in Tarts three days a week. I’d finish a 10-hour day at Lune and head over to the Worksmith kitchen and try and get six hours in there,” he says. He resigned in December, to focus on Tarts Anon.

When he talks about the tarts, his eyes light up.

“The beauty of tarts is that they have so much versatility,” he says. “They can be the knock-together things you find in a rural bakery next to a meringue swan or you can go to a Michelin-star restaurant and get a tart … For me, that’s the pinnacle, because it’s classical cookery but with a little technical application, and it’s so satisfying.”

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Tarts Anon
29a Gwynne Street, Cremorne
No phone

Hours
Wed to Fri 8am–2.30pm
Sat to Sun 8.30am–3pm

tartsanon.com.au
@tarts_anon